


do not go gentle (rage, rage against)

by plingo_kat



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-18
Updated: 2012-10-18
Packaged: 2017-11-16 14:10:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/540296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plingo_kat/pseuds/plingo_kat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony snaps. The results aren't pretty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	do not go gentle (rage, rage against)

They think they can take him?

Tony feels his face contort into a snarl, lips drawing back over his teeth. He spreads his arms wide, feet planted on the ground, entire posture a message: _come and get me_.

Let them fucking try.

They do. Steve – Captain America – goes for him first, a shield throw that Tony has deflected a hundred times, a thousand, and is _this_ what it’s going to be like, this half-hearted effort, this _pathetic_ showing? Has he not convinced them yet that he’s _serious?_

“Is that it?” he hisses, Jarvis stifling the words as they pass through the close air of the helmet. He doesn’t muffle the next question, though, as Tony roars, “IS THAT IT?”

He blasts away an arrow fired by Hawkeye, jets into the air to dodge a strike by Thor. Black Widow is just standing there, watching. It makes him even angrier.

“Is this all you are without me?” Jarvis projects his voice so that the streets ring with a harsh metal blare, a confrontation, a threat. A warning. “Are you even _trying_?”

“We don’t want to hurt you,” Steve calls, tracking him, turning to keep his shield up between them. Good. At least he’s not being a total idiot. “Tony, stop this!”

“Like I asked SHIELD to stop?” Tony says, clenching a fist. “Like I asked _you_ to stop them?” The rage is building up behind his eyes again, a burning beneath his ribs and a pounding in his temples. “Like I asked the _entire world_ , and told them what would happen if they didn’t?”

“Tony,” Steve says, reaching out with his left hand, red like Tony’s own gauntlet. Natasha is already shaking her head; she always was the pragmatic one.

“It’s too late,” Tony says, heartbeat drumming in his ears. “It was too late when all this started.” He raises a hand, palm out in a gesture nothing like peace.

Black Widow presses a button.

For a moment the suit loses power, displays flickering and going dark. Tony is trapped in a metal tomb of his own creation, nostrils flared and teeth gritted, and then a progress bar flickers into being: fifteen, forty, ninety percent.

External cameras come on just soon enough to see Thor’s hammer coming at his side.

“That’s more like it,” he says after he recovers from the impact, voice harsh. “Jarvis, get ready.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Do not do this, my friend,” Thor says, hammer held back but ready. “Your relationships are not yet torn beyond repair.”

“Oh?” Tony makes a sound that barely resembles a laugh at all. “You think so? Then again, none of you thought the way I did, never saw the same things – except Bruce, and _he_ isn’t here, is he. Do you really think I shared all my secrets with you, do you think your little SHIELD hackers could get any further past my firewalls than I _let_ them?”

He sees Natasha give the slightest flinch, and grins savagely in victory.

“Do you even know how much of the world I could control, _right now_ , if I wanted to?”

“Tony,” Steve starts again, and Tony says:

“Now.”

Nothing seems to happen.

“SHIELD acquired,” Jarvis murmurs in his ear. “Satellites alpha, beta, gamma, and omega acquired, peripherals loading. Progress: sixteen percent.”

“Give them their comms.”

Tony gets to hear Nick Fury shouting, cursing out his subordinates and Tony and the Avengers and everything under the sun. When he finally says, “Take him down!” Tony cuts the comms off again.

He cuts everything off, actually; the helicarrier is so much flying flotsam, a net with the anchors cut, self-contained and useless.

“You always did underestimate Jarvis,” Tony says, as the AI alerts him of the various systems he’s uploaded himself into.

Natasha understands what’s happening. She’s the first to react, but not the last. Too little, too late; nobody can keep up with Tony when he’s really trying.

And he’s had _so_ much motivation recently.

“You always underestimated _me_.”

**Author's Note:**

> I banged this out in one night after failing a midterm, because I was _really angry_. The events of this fic coule possibly be due to Tony having been taken over by the Tesseract; personally I imagined it more as SHIELD somehow going way over the line, creating arc reactor technology or making suits, with Tony having... somewhat impaired judgement. Tbh, this would probably never happen, but I needed him to be wrathful, okay? Okay. We'll just label it an evil AU and call it a day.


End file.
